Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neurolink. I'm your host Will Walden, Elon
Musk's ex AI is developing a internal project called Macro
Hard that aims to recreate Microsoft's core system
ecosystem using AI alone. It goes beyond a typical
research experiment and instead reflects Musk's intent to
simulate, replicate, and eventually compete with
Microsoft head to If you have a podcast player
that has comments, I want to let you know that you're allowed to
voice your opinion. I want you to voice your opinion
on this. Is it a smart idea to allow AI
to replicate code and also create more code in fix bugs on
the fly? For enterprise businesses, that
means big business, big, big business.
I'm not talking 10 people, 20 people, 30 people.
We're talking 10s of thousands of people.
Would you trust your 10s of thousands of people in your
organization to use AI software? Or do you want the homemade
version where people create the software and then if you have a
bug, you tell it to somebody and then that somebody tells it to
somebody else and it goes down the chain instead of just robot,
you know, and AI writing all the code.
It's very interesting. So Elon Musk instructed XAI
employees to use AI models to rebuild Microsoft Office,
Microsoft Excel, Word, Teams, Windows, and even GitHub and
PowerShell. Musk selected the name Macro
Hard as a deliberate play on Microsoft's branding.
Microsoft He expects the project to eventually challenge
Microsoft's stronghold over software that underpins the
majority of modern enterprises and governments.
Do you want an AI in charge of your software that you use on a
daily basis? They can see everything that you
do. They know exactly what you do,
all your keystrokes. Could they be tapping into all
of your movements? Yeah, OK, that's just a
conspiracy theory that was just to be kind of, you know, weird
about it. But think about it.
If you're tapped in in the cloud all the time anyway, could they
track everything you do to, quote, make their software
better? Could it be the end user
license, you know, agreement that you have to sign off on
that everything you do has to be tracked by this AI.
And do you want XAI in particular to be in charge of
that software? XAI is going to be used, Grok
and other XAI models to execute real world software workflows
without human engineering. Basically going to be able to
prompt this thing and say I want to, I want these specific
things, these specific features, I do it all the time.
Specifications you, you write a spec sheet and then you have
something like Grok or any other AI program you know that that
they want to use. They can build the software.
I can build software right now. Things that would take me that
would have taken me weeks to build, even a month to build.
I can instruct my AI companion to build something for me at
lovable. Lovable dot dev.
I did something the other day. Here's an example of what I did,
and this is a very simple example.
I had a spec sheet. I knew exactly what I wanted,
knew exactly how it was going to run from the first user
interaction on the homepage. It was a web app first
interaction on the homepage all the way through the process of
check out etcetera. And when I told the AI to write
it, he told me this would be the phases, phase one, phase two,
you know, five phase. I think it was 5 or 6 phases,
I'm not sure. But eventually about two hours
later, we had a fully functional MVP of the software that would
have taken me two weeks to write probably.
And then of course, that's the MVP.
And that actually works through Stripe.
There's e-commerce functionality, e-commerce pages.
All the templates were there, everything was there.
Everything was built out without using any of my hands to code
it. I didn't use anything.
I used Tailwind, Veet, React, etcetera to build this thing out
and it was pretty damn good. So building something like Teams
for an AI model, not going to be that hard.
I, I'm assuming they're going to have this done by the end of
this year, at least a really good model of it.
Because if you can use AI, because also Microsoft already
built this that, you know, use, building the code to make
Windows like a Windows 11 clone is going to be a little bit more
difficult. But something like an app like
Microsoft Word, that's not going to be that difficult compared to
say, a full operating system. Something like Teams, not as
difficult as a full operating system.
They want to use make PowerShell, Excel, Microsoft,
basically Microsoft Office. They're not going to copy it
exactly though. They're going to be able.
They're just going to do this to demonstrate that EI systems can
replicate the same capabilities through reasoning and code
synthesis. So the lead devs will tell it
what to do. We need something similar to
Microsoft Word, but maybe they're going to do something
like I did with Lovable and they were like, just ask it a
question. How do you think the software
would be better? I did that throughout the
development cycle in at points. How would you make this software
better? And tell me the steps you would
do, why it's better, how it's better, and then give me
examples of all of those things. And it did in most of the time,
probably 99% of the time. It was really excellent at
making those decisions. The user flow was at the
beginning, it was an MVP. So it was very basic.
User flow was just like point A, point B, Point C, you know, And
they had other ways to flow the user to the end cycle, to the
buy cycle in just fast and furious ways to get the job
done. It was crazy.
And that's just lovable. Could you imagine something like
Grok who has all of the data? Or you know, I've used other
apps too. I'm a front end developer,
Claude, great at coding ChatGPT, it's pretty good, but it's, I
think Claude is a little bit, I don't know, for the stuff that I
do, it's a little bit better, but have Xai behind it, have
Elon and Grok behind it. It's going to be something, you
know, something ridiculous, I'm sure.
The other thing is this is an internal target includes
recreating Excel with AI agents alone.
And those AI agents understand spreadsheet logic.
They'll be able to generate formulas, suggest corrections,
all without using any existing code.
They're going to create the code completely from scratch, not
going to use any libraries. Another team is focused on
building a fully AI generated OS layer with basic window
management, file storage, and application support.
Again, completely from scratch, no frameworks.
And if this is successful, Elon would be the first to show the
general purpose AI can autonomously generate complex
commercial software from first principles.
No part when they start, there's nothing.
It's just, you know, C++, you know C#, you know whatever
language it is and you build this thing because you we're
going to give you the prompt to build it.
Crazy macro hard is not being built for external users right
now. It will eventually, I'm sure.
I'm sure they'll license this out or find a way to make money
from it. The internal documentation
frames the project is a stress test for grok in the bet.
The general EI can reproduce software systems through self
learning. That's how we get Skynet, man.
This is the software builds the software.
The part builds the part That's crazy.
The initiative emerged shortly after Open A is growing presence
in enterprise tools became clear, including its
partnerships with Microsoft. Elon is, I wouldn't say jealous
of Sam Altman. He's competing.
He's competing directly with Sam and ChatGPT and Open AI.
I think Elon is a little behind the game at this point.
Grok chatbot, pretty cool with some stuff.
It's all right, but it goes off the rails sometimes and open AI
as well. It goes off the rails a little
bit. Open AI.
ChatGPT 5 wasn't such a big thing as everybody thought it
was going to be iterative. You know, we had between 3:00
and 4:00, ChatGPT, it was a huge upgrade.
And everybody thought between 4:00 and 5:00 was going to be
this massive gigantic switch, but it wasn't.
Yeah. It was like, they're just fine
tuning, ironing out some bugs, fixing some stuff up, making it
a more solid platform before they move forward to GPD 6 and,
you know, all the AIS after that.
So Microsoft Open AI, they're working together, of course.
And Elon thinks, well, I can do it better because he's also
already criticized Microsoft's deep ties with Open AI.
He doesn't believe that an quote open source AI company like Open
AI should have funding from a closed source company like
Microsoft. And Microsoft's invest billions
in Open AI and tightly integrated its models into
Office. And Musk has expressed concerns
in the past about the influence Microsoft holds over Open AI's
operations. Internally, XAI researchers view
macro hard as a response to what they consider model capture,
where enterprise players monopolize how AI can be
deployed at scale. XAI is attempting to do the
opposite by removing the human middleware and allowing Grok to
act as the architect, the engineer, the tester, and the
user interface designer. Teams within XAI are using
custom prompts in reinforcement learning techniques, the train
agents that iterate on their own mistakes and optimize outputs
based on user like goals. So instead of simply being a
coding assistant like Copilot, Grok is being trained to become
a full stack developer and a product designer in one.
It's kind of what Lovable does. Lovable dot dev, if you haven't
checked it out, if you want to make a web app or anything in
React, basically the time is now.
Go to Lovable dot dev. I'm like, we're not sponsored by
them, but check it out. I use them all the time.
If I have AFO project, I give it the specs and of course I
disclose that I'll be using AI to build some of the software
and come up with with some great ideas Lovable has.
And how funny is it though? Something like Lovable has its
own ideas from the systems that it's already been implementing.
It's learning as it goes as well.
And XAI is, I wouldn't say catching up to it, not yet.
If they could build this OS, if they can build a kind of a
presentation layer of a Windows OS, Windows Cell OS, yeah, it'd
be incredible. So the larger context though, of
macro Hard includes a growing concern within Musk's network.
The Microsoft's influence over AI infrastructure has become too
concentrated, and by rebuilding key enterprise functions through
autonomous agents at XAI, they want to demonstrate that open
alternatives are possible. Could we, could they build this
and make it sort of like Linux, an open sourced alternative to
Windows that could run Windows games?
I think that's where the logic goes from here.
Elon, he's a big gamer. And I bet you guarantee you one
of the one of the prompts from Elon to his engineering team was
make it able to play games eventually.
Like that's what we want. We want it to be a Steam killer,
the Steam Deck. We want it to be a Windows
killer and we want it to be able to play Windows games.
Can they do that? I don't know.
That's going to be crazy if they can.
But Musk hasn't clarified yet if they're actually going to
release this. But he suggested internally that
such AI created software should run on a future Grok OS that
avoids reliance on legacy platforms.
Make everything open source, everything that he wanted to do
with open AI. Think he gave him 50 million or
something, 500 million. I can't remember the the price
that he gave them or how much money he gave them, but I
believe he's kind of hurt because they went from being
open AI, open AI where they're going to share everything to Sam
Altman getting ridiculously rich from this and all this
stakeholders in this hoping that it everybody becomes ridiculous
rich, ridiculously rich and the bubble doesn't burst.
But as we see now, legacy systems like Google, Microsoft,
all the initial Internet bubble Internet companies that are
still around, you know that Yahoo is still around.
Yeah, it's hard to see something like that unless you're into
sports and like sports betting and stuff like that or fantasy
sports. But yeah, Yahoo is still around.
It's a thing. And you know what?
It's a legacy company. Same with Microsoft, same with
Google. They're legacy companies now.
They do think different, do things differently.
They don't think of the open source anymore, really.
They have a small arm of open source, but if Elon can make a
whole operating system and an office software suite open
source, that would be ridiculous.
If they release this, they'll be nuts, but I don't know if I'd
trust it. Let me know.
Again, like I said before, I need to know what you think.
Let me know what you think about this because it sounds a little
too personal. AI building the software,
reiterating the software, revising the software, make an
AI infrastructure so it keeps building and rebuilding
software. I mean, sure, it's going to be
great software eventually, but do you want an AI in charge or
you don't want people in charge? I it's up to you.
I mean, I have no problem with AI building software.
I use AI to build software all the time.
I think it's great. It's a great cheat code.
You unlock certain things within the software development
platform, like Lovable, and it just goes wild.
You can create some really incredible things, Very complex
things too. Very, very complex things.
I've built some full blown apps, release them to the public, and
they're crazy. You know?
XAI or Elon has not commented publicly on the details of this,
though you know there are. The internal prototypes already
performed basic functions that mirror those of Office and
Teams. One prototype allows Grok to
compose documents real time and revise them based on simulated
team collaboration using a chat interface powered by agent
driven back ends. This is also going to serve a
deeper technical purpose for XAI.
By forcing its models to handle complex software tasks without
pre-existing APIs or templates, the company is generating a
stress testing environment for the new versions of Grok.
The new models. These future systems will likely
integrate self repairing code. Oh my, this is this is getting
scary. Autonomous workflow planning and
adaptive UI generation features that Musk believes are necessary
for AGI to become practical. It has to think for itself self
repairing its code. It's kind of like, how do you
think you you make mistake and because of that mistake, you fix
it, right? You fix whatever mistake it was,
you make yourself a better person.
Self repairing code, we do that, we already do that.
We repair the wrongdoings. So once this autonomy comes to
fruition, AGI will become more practical.
Elon is aiming for broader things.
He's going to be figuring out how software will be written in
the future, desktop software or software that creates desktops
and creates operating systems. And if XAI can figure this out,
of course Tesla bots, Optimus, Tesla vehicles, etcetera, will
all use this in the back end to make their code faster, more
reliable, stronger, more productive.
And guess what bye bye all software engineers, everyone's
getting fired. So future AI with croc no
people, no no no engineers anymore.
There will be some high level engineers but all low level
after the high like anywhere from medium till in turn are
gone. You know, but I think for the
time being, expect to not have your $165,000 starting salary.
If you are a MIT grad. Expect to work at Chipotle.
Because once things like this hit the market, that career is
dunzo. And once Grok can figure out how
to take out the C-Suite of people, and once other AIS can
figure out how to take out the C-Suite and build their own
software to to destroy the C-Suite, it's all over.
The business will be handled by mostly AI, and then we'll just
buy the things from the AI. It's going to be wild.
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